Dec. 24—GOUVERNEUR — St. Lawrence Health anticipates spending a $10 million USDA grant over three years to "enhance the entire EMS system in St. Lawrence County," according to J. Brent Bishop, St. Lawrence Health vice president of business development.

The three-pronged project is aimed at increasing the number of emergency personnel and making it easier for them to figure out to which hospital a patient should be transported.

First, SLH's electronic medical record system will be enhanced and made available to rescue squads and other medical personnel, aimed at providing "increased quality of services, and potentially life-saving treatment, during emergency situations," SLH President Donna M. McGregor said earlier this week.

Second, Clarkson University and SLH will partner to offer programs to train and certify more emergency medical technicians and paramedics.

"There is a shortage of EMTs/paramedics in the county and the state. The training will enhance skills and knowledge of existing EMTs/paramedics," Mr. Bishop said.

The third step will be SLH partnering with local rescue squads to launch the actual transport consortium, which will coordinate rescue squads and SLH's three hospitals — Canton-Potsdam, Massena and Gouverneur — to get patients to the hospital that has the proper specialists or unique services. Patients being transported won't be limited to just those three hospitals. If a patient needs to go to a facility outside St. Lawrence Health, such as Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in Ogdensburg, they'll get there.

"This will enhance access and all inter-facility/intra-facility transfers within and outside St. Lawrence Health, anywhere existing regional ambulances services currently operate," Mr. Bishop said. "It is not specific to patients of SLH and we will abide by the proper EMS protocols. The goal is to enhance the entire EMS System in St. Lawrence County and improve deliverables to all stakeholders."

Part of the $10 million will go into starting an inter-facility transport coordination center that will provide emergency and medical personnel with patient information via SLH's EPIC Emergency Medical Record (EMR), which went live on April 30. St. Lawrence Health officials say there may be an opportunity that the electronic records will enhance personnel working in the field, but it has not yet been tested.

Mr. Bishop said they were only able to get the "best-in-class" medical record system through their affiliation with Rochester Regional Health.

"[It] otherwise would not have been made available without a tertiary affiliation," he said.

St. Lawrence Health is still in the early phases of coordinating the grant. Mr. Bishop said key dates, such as when the Clarkson programs will launch, are forthcoming.

"Logistics are still being finalized and a formal date has yet to be determined," he said.

SLH's announcement of the program earlier this week said the lead organization for the transport consortium will be Gouverneur Hospital.

"For the grant's purposes, Gouverneur Hospital is uniquely positioned to serve as the lead organization due to the location and demographics of their service area," Mr. Bishop said. "Gouverneur Hospital's Critical Access Hospital (CAH) designation is designed to reduce the financial vulnerability of rural hospitals and improve access to healthcare by keeping essential services in rural communities. CAH status allows GH to receive cost-based reimbursement for its Medicare patients and enhanced reimbursement for Medicaid patients as well. This allows the hospital to provide services at volumes that, due to relatively high fixed costs, are typically unsustainable at the demand levels that result from serving small, geographically isolated communities."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determines if a hospital gets a critical access designation. It's determined based on factors including the average length of stay for inpatients, bed count and the proximity of other hospitals.

The transportation consortium will involve partnering with Potsdam Rescue, which SLH's announcement earlier this week described as a primary resource for getting patients to hospitals. The program, however, won't be limited to Potsdam's rescue squad. It will also involve "Canton Rescue and Massena Rescue, and possibly others, through the development of the EMS consortium," according to Mr. Bishop.

"The establishment of the St. Lawrence Rural Transport Consortium will include coordination between all the involved entities and staff," he said.

Alongside the consortium project, St. Lawrence Health is in the middle of a $71.8 million, 121,000-square-foot expansion of Canton-Potsdam Hospital. Officials estimate the project will be finished in 2025, doubling the hospital's footprint and adding 11 new emergency department rooms along with 15 new medical-surgical beds.

The emergency expansion will give that department a total of 28 rooms. The added medical-surgical beds will be private, with individual bathrooms and showers and space for patients' families to stay overnight. The original medical-surgical beds, many of which are now double or triple occupancy, can be reduced to single or double occupancy, depending on need.